To extend the User object with custom fields, the Django docs recommend using UserProfiles. However, according to this answer to a question about this from a year or so back:

extending django.contrib.auth.models.User also works better now -- ever since the refactoring of Django's inheritance code in the models API.

And articles such as this lay out how to extend the User model with custom fields, together with the advantages (retrieving properties directly from the user object, rather than through the .get_profile()).

So I was wondering whether there is any consensus on this issue, or reasons to use one or the other. Or even what the Django team currently think?

I’d wager that probably 90% or more of the things people say they want to do with subclasses could be better accomplished by instead defining a related model and linking it back with a unique foreign key.

So I believe the best way to go is still to use an external app, such as some components of Pinax, or the django-profiles app (originally from the same James Bennett).